By the early 1930s, scientists had concluded that, after converting all of their hydrogen to helium, stars lose energy and contract under the influence of their own gravity. These stars, known as white dwarf stars, contract to about the size of Earth, and the electrons and nuclei of their constituentatoms are compressed to a state of extremely high density. Chandrasekhar determined what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit—that a star having a mass more than 1.44 times that of the Sun does not form a white dwarf but instead continues to collapse, blows off its gaseous envelope in a supernova explosion, and becomes a neutron star. An even more massive star continues to collapse and becomes a black hole. These calculations contributed to the eventual understanding of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes.

An overview of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s contribution to the understanding of black holes.

Chandrasekhar joined the staff of the University of Chicago, rising from assistant professor of astrophysics (1938) to Morton D. Hull distinguished service professor of astrophysics (1952), and became a U.S. citizen in 1953. He did important work on energy transfer by radiation in stellar atmospheres and convection on the solar surface. He also attempted to develop the mathematical theory of black holes, describing his work in The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (1983).

Chandrasekhar was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1953, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1962, and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1984. His other books include An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure (1939), Principles of Stellar Dynamics (1942), Radiative Transfer (1950), Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability (1961), Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (1987), and Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader (1995).

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...Journal of Physics and the Indian Academy of Sciences, and trained hundreds of students who found important posts in universities and government in India and Myanmar (Burma). He was the uncle of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics, with William Fowler.

This limiting value was named for the Indian-born astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who formulated it in 1930. Using Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and the principles of quantum physics, Chandrasekhar showed that it is impossible for a white dwarf star, which is supported solely by a degenerate gas of electrons, to be stable if its mass is greater than 1.44 times the...

August 9, 1911 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. March 14, 1995 Pasadena, California American nuclear astrophysicist who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for his role in formulating a widely accepted theory of element generation.

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(1910-95). U.S. astrophysicist. Born in Lahore, India, Chandrasekhar went to England on a scholarship and pursued graduate studies in astronomy and physics at Cambridge University. He taught at Cambridge from 1933 to 1937 and then was offered a research position at the University of Chicago, where he remained until his death in 1995. In 1983, he received the Nobel prize in physics for his theories of stellar evolution, which included the development and structure of white dwarf stars and black holes. He also calculated what became known as Chandrasekhar’s limit, which contributed to the eventual understanding of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes. (See also Asian Americans; physics.)